The Interview: Paul Peros, Founder & CEO of Réduit

With over 30 years of experience, Paul Peros has led a number of successful luxury consumer brands. The former CEO of cleansing giant Foreo is now the Founder and CEO of Réduit, the beauty tech company creating enhanced skincare and haircare treatments which aim to be more precise, sustainable and effective than traditional products.

Using ultrasonic diffusion and magnetic misting technologies, the brand's treatments aim to break through the protective layer of skin and hair, helping active ingredients get exactly where they are needed to make a real difference.

Most recently, the brand launched Boost. Unlike its other launches, this new technology allows consumers to use the device with their existing skincare products. The device scans the barcode of a skincare product to identify its active ingredients and then works to maximise its results.

In this interview with TheIndustry.beauty, Peros speaks about Réduit's journey since launching, the brand's latest innovation and the appeal of beauty tech to consumers.

What first sparked your interest in beauty technology?

The challenge of innovation. If you were to go back over 40 years ago, you will find beauty was in the same league as consumer electronics. When you think about how much has happened in consumer electronics since, from home computing to telecommunications and smartphones, beauty has only changed incrementally at best in comparison. I think there is the key challenge on how to unleash innovation at a faster pace within beauty in general and that is what beauty tech is for me.

What inspired you to launch Réduit?

Réduit itself is a new brand, but it's based on 20 years of research and development from its mother company, Wellfully. This looks at enhanced delivery technologies, spanning not just beauty and personal care but also medical applications. So, one of the key drivers in starting the brand was the presence of technology that was far beyond the ones we had not just at Foreo but all our peers within the device business three years ago.

What was the first product Réduit launched with?

The haircare applicator, which was combined with five distinct haircare solutions presented as an enhanced delivery system to enhance actives via diamagnetic fields. Also, by creating our own formulations, we managed to make a product that works without usual thickeners/emulsifiers because we were delivering the product through a piezo diffuser, which creates a really fine and highly concentrated mist. This allows the user to absorb the product and experience effectiveness that is better traditional products applied by hand.

Réduit now covers both haircare and skincare, can you tell me more about what the products aim to do? 

If you're talking about the different pods with different formulations, the premise there is that we keep it quite vanilla, in the sense that we are addressing the most common problems. The active ingredients we have on the market today are generally really, really good. So, there is also a bit of a curation process in terms of selecting which ones we work with. The key difference across both hair and skin is the focus on getting the right active ingredients in the right place to do whatever they're supposed to do.

Reduit One

How do you feel about the brand's progression since launching? 

It’s now been three years since we came up with the concept for Réduit. As the name suggests, it’s about reducing waste. It’s a minimalist approach and it’s an extreme focus on effectiveness.

In terms of range evolution, there has been some anachronisms. The Réduit Boost only launched a few months ago, but that would have probably been the natural first product for us. However, that was an impossibility because the technology usage rights that were needed for the Boost were with one of our historical collaborative technology partners Procter & Gamble, given in exclusivity to them by one of my predecessors. So, in addition to starting at Réduit and launching the first product, we spent the last two years also negotiating back our own technology from large companies such as P&G.

You mentioned that Réduit is all about reducing waste, can you tell me more about how the brand is sustainable?

For typical skincare application, a user would normally use about two millilitres of product. When applying our products, they won't need more than 0.2 millilitres because of the way we deliver it. This reduction also applies to the way we deal with environmental impact across products, logistics, packaging, materials and factories, for example. This is important because - yes, the beauty industry is trying to get more in tune with some environmental performance requirements but it's happening by incremental steps, often starting from a non-environmentally friendly level - so from the start we have defined our product architectures to be ten times smaller in quantity, packaging and well, everything.

You recently launched Réduit Boost, can you tell me more about this?

Boost is a universal skincare applicator, designed to help enhance the delivery and effectiveness of existing skincare products that consumers already know and use. It is made for the consumer that has already found the products they like and so, we then help to deliver a better result from the existing active ingredients in products. Then the personalisation happens with the skin differences we find in consumers, where we have the ability to adjust the delivery to a particular skin type for products that are maybe not personalised in the first place.

Reduit Boost

What makes this better than someone just applying products with their hands?

Enhanced delivery technology. The device harnesses Pulsed Electromagnetic Fields Technology (PEMFT) and the power of diamagnetics for deeper penetration of active ingredients. This could be ingredients such as niacinamide, hyaluronic acid, retinol or vitamins.

Can you tell me about how NASA links to the product? 

Powered by the NASA technology, the Boost's smart technology identifies active ingredients present in skincare products and tailors a unique “waveform” via PEMFT to push the right ingredients into the skin at the required depth. The idea is to make an average or lower price point product perform like very expensive one by getting what is in the product in the right place, compared to traditional application of a skincare products, where you are limited to perhaps 4% or 5% of the active ingredients. By making the lower price point products perform, it helps them to match more expensive peers on the market.

Reduit Boost

Why do you think consumers are becoming more interested in beauty tech?

It's opening new performance levels and making existing products perform better. In general, we have also changed in the sense of having greatly accelerated the acceptance of technology in products. It's beauty tech that is effectively bringing most of the innovation these days.

What do you think the future of beauty tech looks like?

The way I say it to myself is we cannot even imagine where beauty is going to go next and it's our job to develop that.

Do you have any future ambitions for the brand?

I hope Réduit will become one of the major voices in beauty tech. We're seeking impact and to really mark the industry in terms of positive change.